Backpage accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution advertising among five Web sites that carry such ads in the United States, earning more than $22 million annually from prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a media research and consulting company. It is now the premier Web site for human trafficking in the United States, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. And it’s not a fly-by-night operation. Backpage is owned by Village Voice Media, which also owns the estimable Village Voice newspaper.

Attorneys general from 48 states have written a joint letter to Village Voice Media, pleading with it to get out of the flesh trade. An online petition at Change.org has gathered 94,000 signatures asking Village Voice Media to stop taking prostitution advertising. Instead, the company has used The Village Voice to mock its critics. Alissa thought about using her real name for this article but decided not to for fear that Village Voice would retaliate.

How could she think such a thing of those beneficent, woman-loving leftists?

Recall the prime directive in the film Toy Story: a toy must never speak to its owner. Why? because The toy’s purpose is to serve as an outlet for a child’s imagination. An actual relationship with the child spoils that mission.

Anyone who opposes sexism and has some involvement in the entertainment media will pursue projects that encourage the meme of male-female peer relationships (whether platonic or romantic), or at least avoid stuff that presses the women-as-toys meme. (And avoid women-as-minstrel-show-caricatures, a la Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives.) It seems to me that entertainment trends more heavily toward sexism than anti-sexism.

As far as I know, from hearing people involved talk about it, that advertising is not – contra what an association of Attorney Generals wants to imply – primarily Human Sex Slaves Being Sold By Wicked Pimps, but individuals having sex for money because they choose to.

(Not to mention that somehow prostitution existed before the internet! Shall we prefer street-walking? Because history suggests that in no possible way can we prevent people from providing or consuming that service.)

And I don’t have a problem with it per se – and thus I don’t have a problem with the Village Voice profiting off it.

(I’ll happily mock their “Women’s Rights And Interests Are Whatever We Say They Are And Nothing Else” stance, but that’s universal to the class, and unrelated to this kerfuffle.)

I won’t be the hypocrite they’re being accused of being by rejecting self-interest and individual decision when it happens to involve having sex – rather than any other form of activity – for money.

(And the hilarity of quoting signature counts at Change.org? I’ve seen how that crap gets around, and frankly I’m tempted to count online petitions as negatives, since nobody signing them is a serious person.

Click here to take a meaningless stand on a topic we’re going to present in a completely one-sided way! Yay!)

The point is holding the hypocritical Left to their own rhetoric. In this case, prostitution is just institutionalized sexism, which is a sin according to the Left, ergo the Left should have no part of it. Of course, this mask fell during the Clinton years, so an article like this is almost nostalgic.

[Interestingly, they are not so different from the “Radical Right” in this conclusion (their reasoning differs, of course…)]